Last Modified: 24 March 1998
Electronic Publishing Group
The GeoData Institute is a research organisation and contract agency based within the University of Southampton providing integrated environmental research and consultancy services, particularly in the field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The Institute's consultants and scientists provide a broad range of environmental services and draw upon complementary skills within the University and other institutions to construct specialist project teams.In the last 5 years, the Institute has, through a number of projects, built up a substantial resource and skill base in the development and dissemination of a range of multimedia training and awareness materials and interactive information systems. The Electronic Publishing Group within the Institute have specialised in providing services in this area at all stages of development, including design, development, marketing and distribution, and the application for financial support for such projects.
Due to the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional nature of the Institute, the Electronic Publishing Group have been able to gain unique experience working with the academic, public and private sectors. In particular, successful projects have been carried out with a wide range of academic groups both at Southampton, and other educational establishments. These have included the development of materials for teaching the subjects of geography, biology, sociology, language studies, anatomy and physics. Financial support for this work has been secured from funding groups including ITTI, Continuing Education, HEFCE and JISC.
In the academic sector, interactive multimedia course materials have been developed in response to the urgent practical need to deliver high-quality teaching to increasingly large classes, while providing high level transferable skills. Resources typically integrate all necessary materials relating to a subject area, including core course materials, lecture notes, handouts, questionnaires, assignments and help facilities. These are presented in a variety of multimedia formats, such as text, images, video and sound, integrated using a suitable hypermedia system, such as the WWW or the open hypermedia system Microcosm (developed at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science). Where additional modelling or interactivity are required, extra functionality is directly programmed using an appropriate software development environment.
The Institute's computing resources, and authoring and programming skills span a range of hardware and operating system platforms, including DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Unix. A range of multimedia tools and associated skills are available to produce an effective and appropriate application from an initial set of requirements. The Institute operates its own (Unix based) WWW server, enabling the development of complex applications, which make use of server and client interactivity through the use of tools such as CGI programming and Java. The Institute also has specialist skills in the development of complex relational databases, and their integration with multimedia information systems. The Institute Unix facility includes the ORACLE7 Server distributed RDBMS (and associated development and networking tools) - one of the most advanced and powerful systems available.
With the range of facilities and skills available in the GeoData Institute, the Electronic Publishing Group can offer informed and impartial advice on all aspects of multimedia development, regardless of the Institute's role in any subsequent work.
The list below details a few completed and ongoing Institute projects. The group is constantly looking for new application areas and dissemination projects. If you would like to find out more about any of these, or wish to discuss a potential application, please contact us at the address below.
Jason Sadler
Electronic Publishing Group
GeoData Institute
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJTel: (01703) 592719
Fax: (01703) 594628e-mail: geodata@soton.ac.uk
www: http://www.geodata.soton.ac.uk
Projects
The GIS Awareness PackageDeveloped by the Institute in 1993 and funded by ITTI, the package consists of a booklet covering the basics of GIS, plus four PC based tutorials each lasting approximately 30 minutes. From a review in Mapping Awareness, October 1993, vol 7, no 8, p48:
...the package represents exceedingly good value for money and will have broad appeal as an educational tool in the academic and commercial sectors, as well as in the GIS user community.More information and sample screens
Multimedia Delivery of Coastal Zone Management Training (CZM)A CZM multimedia applications has been custom written for an Environmental Management undergraduate course, used by over 180 second year Physical Geography students. The materials are structured into three units, coastal zone environmental management, oil spill model and contingency plans, and a cost benefit analysis of sea defence options for Chesil Beach in Dorset. The core of the CZM application is a substantial collection of multimedia documents relevant to coastal zone management, including a large volume of text files (around 2000 pages), bitmap images (30MB), video clips (10MB), spreadsheets preloaded with coastal zone economic data, and Microcosm devices such as Mimics (guided tours of other documents).
The PC version comprises a Windows application developed using Microsoft Visual Basic to provide a front-end services provided by the Microcosm open hypermedia system. Using the university Campus Network and public workstation clusters, the courseware was made accessible to the students simultaneously at over 100 Windows PCs in three locations around the campus. The second year of development included a parallel WWW implementation, making use of appropriate technology to replicate the interactivity of the PC front-end and hypermedia system. Access to this version is only limited by copyright restrictions.
An academic publication describing the application, and a sample screen.
An Introduction to Light MicroscopyA set of Windows applications have been developed in collaboration with the Department of Biology in order to supplement teaching the principles of light microscopy to 210 undergraduate students. The project comprises 3 distinct programs, a Microscope Viewer allowing students to view, rotate and zoom in on high quality photographs of three instruments, a Slide Viewer displaying a number of digitised specimens viewed under various microscope settings, and a generic quiz application used for revision and student assessment. Hypertext links with the RMS Dictionary of Light Microscopy are built into the application.
Sample Microscope Viewer screen, Slide Viewer screen.
Behavioural and Evolutionary EcologyA set of WWW resources have been developed for the Biology Department Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology Research Group (BEER Group), to support the teaching of Population Genetics to undergraduate students.
A range of WWW resources were compiled, each making use of facilities provided by the Institute's Unix and WWW servers. In particular, a set of programs were written to facilitate the interactive visualisation of mathematical formulae (or data) through a WWW interface. Allowing users to enter variables for an equation, and immediately view the results, the application has since been applied to other subject areas. To complement these facilities, a separate application has been developed to support group discussion using the WWW, used by students as the main forum for debate.
The GeoData Quiz
A generic application for revision and assessment
The GeoData Quiz comprises a collection of applications for producing and presenting quizzes and questionnaires either in a Windows environment or via the Web (WebQuiz).
The Windows Quiz and QuizWriter
An interactive Windows Quiz application has been developed with the support of a number of departments within the University. The design philosophy behind the application was to create a generic tool for questioning students in the University networked Windows environment, replicating and extending typically used question formats. The Quiz application has on a number of occasions successfully been used in the formal assessment of several hundred (Biology and Medical) students in a single afternoon.
The executable program presents information from quiz configuration files which determine the application behaviour and specify an arbitrary number of quiz questions using several standard templates. Quizzes are fully modifiable by course tutors either by editing the files directly, or using the associated Quiz Writer application. Available question types are True-False, Fill the Gaps, Multiple Choice, Drag and Drop, and Identify features from an Image. Current facilities include question timing, practice and assessed questions (with optional scoring and feedback), variable tries per answer, flexible answer matching through the use of wildcards and accepted variations, and multimedia linking. Facilities for enforcing exam conditions include the inability to exit or restart the application, options for ensuring all question parts are completed before continuing, and quiz file encryption.
Sample Quiz screens (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and Quiz Writer screen.
Here are the Quiz brochure pages.
The Quiz and Quiz Writer are freely available to all groups within the University of Southampton (you can download them if you are within this domain, or have a key), and the Institute is currently looking into wider dissemination of these applications. Prices are also available for other academic institutions, and to commercial users on application.
A World Wide Web version of the Quiz is currently under development at
the GeoData Institute. Quizzes can be developed and tested using the
Windows QuizWriter and seamlessly delivered via the Internet. The
current version (2.0, March 1998) supports virtually all features of
the Windows version, plus
additional Web functionality. This diagram shows the system architecture
of the Windows and WebQuiz applications, illustrating the interaction
between the two. The WebQuiz uses standard HTML forms and the CGI
interface to deliver quizzes from a Web server to any browser
supporting these standards - no plug-in technologies or Java or
Javascript functionality are required.
The WebQuiz
Here is another sample quiz, displaying the same questions all at once rather than one at a time and using slightly different quiz file settings (sample2.qiz). You can also try out some Quizzes from our New Forest pages.
Using the WebQuiz application in Questionnaire Mode provides an efficient mechanism for generating Web-based forms and questionnaires. The collection and collation of results is handled robustly and efficiently by the logging facilities of the program. For example, here is a version of the University Standard Evaluation Questionnaire, the results of which are collated into the log file in a compact format, with one submission per row. This may easily be imported into a spreadsheet package for further analysis.
The WebQuiz will be freely available to all groups within the University of Southampton and the Institute is currently looking into wider dissemination of the Quiz applications. Prices are available for other academic institutions, and to commercial users on application.
Please contact us if you would like more information on these products. The GeoData Institute Quiz applications were presented at the Computer Based Assessment Workshop, January 28th 1998, University of Manchester.
GeoData Institute,
Electronic Publishing Group
